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Look Up (short story)
"Look Up" is a short story written by Matthew Little. Plot The story is told in two short sections. It begins with a man named Jeremy waking up and realizing he's running late for an appointment. He has to make it downtown to meet with a real estate agent and his brother in order to finalize the sale of his business in hopes to acquire some money so he can move his family into a better home comfortably. On the way he receives a call, and in the few seconds it takes him to answer he loses control of his car and swerves off the road, hitting something in the process. The second section shows a mother, Priscilla, and her daughter, Angelica, setting up a lemonade stand. The stand is a surprise for Angelica, who had been eager to have one after seeing it in a cartoon. She makes her first dollar after selling a drink to their neighbor, and after the neighbor departs for work Priscilla leaves Angelica unattended while she gets her tanning chair from the backyard. As Angelica holds her first dollar up to the sun a gust of wind knocks it out of her hand. While she's distracted trying to get it back, a car is heard coming from up the street. Priscilla comes back with her chair and screams as it rushes toward Angelica, who is still distracted by her dollar. The story ends stating that Angelica had only heard the car and had no time to react, "much less look up", insinuating that she had been hit by Jeremy's car. Inspiration and writing At the time of the story's inception Little had been reading a book of short stories by Shirley Jackson. He in particular enjoyed one that was only a few pages long that didn't seem to go anywhere, but he appreciated that the story still said something within a space of only a few words. The idea for "Look Up" came to him one night when he was doing the dishes. He looked into his living room and saw a Welles Fargo commercial that featured a group of girl scouts selling lemonade and brownies. He doesn't recall how the idea grew from there, it could be that after that commercial one for a car came on, but somehow he came up with the idea: "What if a car came and plowed through them?" That night he sat down and wrote it in about four or five hours, finishing it at around 3AM. He wrote the story as an exercise in coming out with a story that was "inherently pointless that still packs a punch". He stated that after writing it he felt bad that the only action comes from the fact that it leads to a climax where a little girl is ran over by an out of control car, and theorized that readers would react to it similarly as readers did after reading Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery", which caused an uproar back in the 1940's. He soon got over it after realizing that readers of the day have grown since then, and are mostly used to brutal stories of this nature. As he wrote it, he envisioned the ending as having more of an impact. He wanted the reader to really feel that a car was coming toward them and experience it as one does a fever dream and have an overwhelming rush of a feeling. The last line was originally extended to say: :"She got to her feet and had no time to react, much less look up, before getting nailed by the grille of Jeremy’s car." But when he showed it to a friend, he thought the story would conclude better if it ended by simply stating that she just didn't have no time to react, to which Little agreed.